By Dr. Robert Thorson I was delighted by the recent discovery of a mysterious rock on Mars that looks like a jelly doughnut and caused a brief scientific sensation. To see that much excitement brought to bear on any rock made the geo-educator in me feel pleased. Alas, geology is of marginal interest to most […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The price of oil rocketed up last week. So did political interest in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas lie beneath one of Earth’s most pristine ecosystems. To drill or not to drill? I hope the answer is […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Two weeks ago Friday, an electrocuted eastern gray squirrel shocked UConn’s Storrs campus into submission. It blew a transformer, tripped the nearest electrical circuit and sent a power outage cascading across much of campus. On a list provided by the administration, I counted 92 buildings that were affected. This included the […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson George W. Bush, I’m afraid, wants to be a space cowboy. How else can we explain his administration’s raid on NASA’s science budget to finance heroic manned missions back to the moon, then onward to Mars? Whoopee ti-yi-yo! Git along, little spacecraft! Ride ’em, astronauts! Lofty, seemingly impossible, dare-to-dream goals are […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Look carefully at the head of any U.S. nickel. The graven image of Thomas Jefferson is being forced to stare at the words “In God We Trust.” If Jefferson were with us today and able to inscribe his own coin, I think he would prefer “In Nature We Trust.” This would […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson It was the best of places. It was the worst of places. That’s what Charles Dickens might have said about wind power development in a tale of two landscapes, offshore Nantucket and the Berkshires, respectively. I’m in favor of the Cape Wind project near Nantucket, Mass., where developers hope to cluster […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson It’s an inconvenient truth that “An Inconvenient Truth” won this year’s Oscar for a documentary feature film. Though I liked the movie, it proves that that Hollywood has become an unofficial fourth branch of government, operating far beyond the reach of constitutional checks and balances. I’m worried because the majority of […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson What’s the biggest skeleton in UConn’s closet? It’s New England’s finest and oldest specimen of the American mastodon. In August 1913, a nearly complete skeleton of Mammut americanum was discovered on a magnificent country estate in Farmington, now called the Hill-Stead Museum. This was the home of Theodate Pope Riddle, Connecticut’s […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Memorial Day honored those human beings who gave their lives in service to our country. With no disrespect to veterans and their families, I recommend that we duplicate this idea for landscapes that have fallen in service to our nation. The idea of a memorial day for dead landscapes came to […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson I don’t understand the Base Realignment and Closure Commission process as it applies to the Naval Submarine Base at Groton. But first, here are three things about BRAC that I do understand. The military, like any large corporation, must always be looking for ways to do its job better. Tradition may […]